y Chapter Two of Mark’s Gospel, however, and from the very first verse, Jesus was deliberately challenging long-accepted and widely-approved religious notions. He healed a man who was paralyzed. Maybe it was from a stroke, maybe from a disease; it doesn’t say. But instead of healing him directly, Jesus instead told the man, “Your sins are forgiven.” Now why would he do that? It may be because he sensed the paralyzed man thought his paralysis had inflicted him because of his sins. We of course would not see it that way, and I trust Jesus didn’t see it that way either. But perhaps the man did. If so, Jesus wanted him to be healed in the only way he, the man, thought healing was possible, and that was to have his sins forgiven.

Throughout the Old Testament, there are scattered references, especially in the prophetic writings, to what is called “the day of the Lord.” When the day of the Lord would come, these verses proclaimed, God would enter directly into human history, and the good people, presumably worthy Israelites or Jews, would be saved, and most other people would be either be shunted aside or destroyed. It was never absolutely clear what the idea of “the day of the Lord” entailed, but it was sufficiently formulated in the minds of the prophets that they felt compelled to proclaim that God’s grand and glorious day was surely coming.

There is one event in the life of Jesus which initially seems so unpredictable and enigmatic as to be either inexplicable or incomprehensible --- or both. And that event is the one which ended Jesus’ life, which is, of course, the crucifixion. Today I shall not be addressing the theological implications of the cross, but rather the historical factors which seemed to render it inevitable, even though to anyone other than Jesus the crucifixion was utterly unimaginable.

Trudy Yates was not a conventional Christian, but she was among the most committed of Christians whom I have ever known. She thought through every facet of her faith. Surely it is not necessary or even possible that every Christian should be steeped in deep thought for a lifetime, but she was one for whom deep thought about everything was her life’s passion. She was a woman who lived in two worlds --- for three-quarters of her life in the New World, and then for the last quarter in the Old World. Because she was Trudy, she fit in wherever she was, making many friends who respected, admired, and loved her for the rich depth of her personality, even if they might not always agree with her.

An earthquake and tidal wave kill thousands of people in Indonesia, Thailand, Bangladesh, India, and as far away as the east coast of Africa. Why? The epicenter of an earthquake is underneath the Haitian capital of Port-au-Prince. Two hundred thousand people are killed, and millions are left homeless. Why? Tornados and floods rip through the American Midwest at Christmastime, 2015. Why? An ebola epidemic sweeps through West Africa, and thousands die or are sickened. Why? A three-year-old child is diagnosed with a virulent form of cancer, and within six months she is dead. Why? A man walking down a city street is killed by a bullet from a bungled drive-by shooting. Why? Muslim terrorists attack the editorial offices of the Charlie Hebdo magazine in Paris, killing several people and wounding others. Why?

Today I want for us to ponder some of the observations Jesus made about wealth. But first let us note that the word “wealth” has great flexibility of meaning in the minds of everyone who ever lived. Most of us would consider anyone whose total assets are a million dollars is wealthy. But such a person might consider someone wealthy who is worth a hundred million dollars. And those folks might assume truly wealthy people are like Bill Gates or Warren Buffett or Donald Trump. There are many people living on Hilton Head Island who would consider anyone who attends The Chapel Without Walls to be wealthy. We may not see them often, but they’re here. There are people living in small one-room apartments in many American cities who would think the people on Hilton Head Island who think we are wealthy are wealthy. And there are people living on the streets of Mumbai or Lagos or Rio de Janeiro who would think those people were wealthy. In other words, to some extent “wealth” is in the eye of the beholder.

So which is it: Does God cause us grief, or does God not willingly afflict or grieve us? Are our troubles in life the result of our own doing or the doings of others, or are they clearly punishments or adversities which God thrusts upon us, and only God can explain them?

Whatever may have been be the actual circumstances of the men from the East and their search for the place to which they believed the star was leading them, the writer of the Gospel of Matthew was wanting as convincingly as possible to suggest that the birth of Jesus Christ was not just a local event, in Bethlehem, or a national event, in the Roman province called Judea, but a cosmic event, a universal event, an event which would change the world forever. It was where East would meet West, and God would bring together all peoples everywhere.

It is impossible to ignore the power of individual recollection and imagination. It also is impossible to ignore the power of collective recollection and imagination. For example, think of where you were when you first heard that President Kennedy had been shot. Or think of where you were when you first heard about the attacks on the World Trade Center on 9/11. Then ponder how your personal memory of those events was affected by the things you saw on television and your conversations with many other people immediately afterward, and how together all of us formed a national understanding of how those events occurred and how we interpreted their meaning.

A funny thing happened on the way to giving this sermon a title. A couple of weeks ago I started an intermittent sermon series called The Wisdom of Jesus. The first one was about adversaries, and this one is about forgiveness. I had not actually decided on any scripture passages when I announced today’s sermon, but I thought that Jesus frequently spoke about forgiveness in his wisdom teaching. However, as I discovered to my chagrin, he didn’t.

Today we shall look at two passages about how we should relate to personal adversaries. They are included in what the Church has always called the Sermon on the Mount, which is found in the Gospel of Matthew, Chapters 5 through 7. The entire “sermon” illustrates many examples of what may properly be called “Wisdom Literature.”

The primary purpose of religion that I hope you will think about this morning is that religion always attempts to lead people into a life of faith. That is especially true of the Christian religion. One of the primary reasons for its existence is to assist people to make what Soren Kierkegaard, Paul Tillich, and others have called “the leap of faith.” The first verse of the eleventh chapter of the Letter to the Hebrews is perhaps its best-known and most influential verse: “Now faith is the assurance of things hoped for, the conviction of things not seen.”

This, in one sense, is literally a life or death sermon. I have talked about death before, probably too much, because I may admittedly be fixated on it. I likely have seen too many people die and I have officiated at too many funerals for me to have psychological and theological equilibrium on this subject. But this time I am going beyond anything I have ever said before. This time I am saying it may be ethically acceptable to take one’s own life, not for the sake of oneself, but for the sake of one’s spouse or family or friends, and for all of society. That is why it is socially-oriented suicide. It isn’t for the patient or for the person who decides to end life sooner than would occur naturally; it is for the sake of the world than we might choose to die.

What follows is an historical summary of how I believe the crucifixion of Jesus Christ came to have such immense importance in the New Testament Church and in the entire Church of Jesus Christ ever since the first century. Make no mistake about it: Without the cross, Christianity as we know it would be a totally different religion from what it is. If Jesus had died as an old man, we might never have heard of him. His death on a cross became a central element of Christian belief.

We have all known what we call “perfectionists.” They strive for perfection in many goals of the human race: to be the perfect athlete, the perfect parent, the perfect employer, the perfect employee, the perfect doctor, lawyer, merchant, or chief. And it is all in vain. No one can be perfect in anything, let alone everything. Even the apostle Paul, the one indispensable man of the New Testament Church, recognized that. In his letter to the Philippians, he said he was trying to improve himself physically, mentally, and spiritually. “Not that I have already obtained this or am already perfect,” he wrote (Phil. 3:12 ff), but he was pressing on “toward the goal for the prize of the upward call of God in Christ Jesus.”

What is religious extremism? It is religion that finds its essence in rules and regulations, in attempts to delineate mainly what the people of God should or should not do, and it spends much of its energy disapproving of other people’s behavior while never examining one’s own behavior. Extremist religion is The Scarlet Letter, Elmer Gantry, fundamentalist Christianity, some forms of evangelical Christianity, extremely liberal Christianity, ultra-Orthodox Judaism, Salafist Islam, Al Qaeda, ISIS, ISIL, or the Islamic State (take your pick), or Burmese Buddhists killing Burmese Muslims. Extremist religion comes in many guises and forms in all religions.

This sermon shall be like none other I have ever preached. It shall consist mainly of ethical questions with respect to politics for which I shall provide no answers. You should not deduce from that that I have no answers to these questions for myself. Quite the contrary, I can answer each of them very quickly to my own satisfaction. Furthermore, you may deduce by some of my follow-up questions how I would answer them. But I want you to think about how you would answer these questions. These inquiries are, I believe, important issues, and we as voters should give them much thought as we listen to the candidates when they attempt to gain our votes. God wants us to be as honest and truthful in our politics as in all other aspects of our lives.

Today I want for us to think about the many concepts of Christ we also create, and for similar reasons. We cannot see God at all, but we’re sure that certain people in the 1st century of the Common Era did see Jesus, and most if not all of them formed their own concepts of who he was by having been eyewitnesses to his life. Today, twenty centuries after Jesus lived, we who are Christians also form our own concepts of him, but we do so from a very different perspective. Much of what we conclude about Jesus is determined by what we have heard or read from the four Gospels and from others who have given us their views of Jesus for twenty centuries.

We have come to the end of this series of six sermons about David, the second and the greatest of the kings of Israel. In the Books of I and II Samuel and I Kings, we learn more about particular events in the life of David than we are told about anyone else’s life in the Bible, including both Moses and Jesus. The Torah and the Gospels tell us more about what Moses and Jesus said, but the history books tell us more about what David did.

How do family members treat one another? Are they respectful and considerate of one another, or do they act like some of the characters they see on television sit-coms, whose situations are often more pathetic than comic? Do they realize that each has a major stake in the success --- or failure --- of all the others?